Eugene Helimski

Eugene Arnoľdovič Helimski (Russ. Евге́ний Арно́льдович Хели́мский: 15 March 1950 in Odessa, USSR – 25 December 2007 in Hamburg, Germany) — a Russian linguist (in the latter part of his life working in Germany), Doctor of Philosophy (1988), Professor.

Helimski researched Samoyedic and Finno-Ugric languages, problems of Uralic and Nostratic linguistic affinity, language contact, the theory of genetic classification of languages, and the cultural history of Northern Eurasia and of shamanism. He became one of the world's leading specialists in Samoyedic languages.

Helimski graduated from the Department of Structural and Applied Linguistics of Moscow State University (1972); completed a Dissertation on "Ancient Ugro-Samoyedic Linguistic Ties" (Tartu, 1979); completed the Doctoral Dissertation on "Historical and Descriptive Dialectology of the Samoyedic Languages" (Tartu, 1988); worked at the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences (1978—1997); lectured at the RSUH (1992—1998), University of Budapest (1994—1995) and other European universities. From 1998 onward, he was Professor of Hamburg University and Director of the Institute of Finno-Ugrian and Uralic Studies in Hamburg.

Helimski was a participant and organizer of numerous linguistic expeditions to Siberia and to the Taimyr Peninsula; field studies of all Samoyedic languages, one of the authors of the well-known "Studies on the Selkup Language" which were based on field studies and which have substantially broadened the linguistic understanding of Samoyedic. He exposed a number of regularities in the historical phonetics of Hungarian, and substantiated the existence of grammatical and lexical Ugro-Samoyedic parallels. He gathered all accessible data on Mator, the extinct South-Samoyedic language, and published its dictionary and grammar. He proposed a number of novel Uralic, Indo-European and Nostratic etymologies, and collected a large body of material on the borrowed lexicon of the languages of Siberia (including Russian).

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